Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

Conclusion:

The Seagate Barracuda Green drive with Advanced Format and Smart Align technology is a beast to be reckoned with. This drive is all about a balance of strong performance with low overhead. For just a bit more than $100 you get a massive 2TB of space (before formatting) that is quiet and consumes a low amount of power. Seagate has put a lot of time and research into this drive and it shows. I was fortunate enough to have been involved with the Barracuda Green Advanced Format drive for a while now, starting with the Alpha testing and I have watched as this technology matured into an awesome product. Seagate took the new technology further with their Smart Align feature, which takes apart the puzzle of your data and matches it up where it belongs. This saves you time when reading files needed for your data and games.

I was surprised on how much faster the Seagate Barracuda was compared to the Western Digital Caviar drive. While sometimes it was only slightly faster there were some instances such as with the IO Meter tests where the Barracuda was more than twice as fast. For the $15 or so difference between the two drives I would definitely choose the Barracuda drive with the increased performance. With this new Advanced Format technology, gone are the days where you need high RPM drives that require massive amounts of power and give off a lot of heat and noise.

If you are in the market for an inexpensive yet high-performing main drive or even a secondary drive with lots of storage space to compliment your SSD, then I would highly recommend you look at the newer Advanced Format drives. For the price, the Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 drive has one of the best price to performance ratios that I have seen in some time.